


Naming of Parts

by Prochytes



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-29
Updated: 2013-10-29
Packaged: 2017-12-30 21:35:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1023640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prochytes/pseuds/Prochytes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What's in a name?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Naming of Parts

**Author's Note:**

> Small spoilers for _Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D_ 1x01. Originally posted on LJ in 2013.

After his team’s first encounter with Skye, Coulson asked her opinion of the experience. Any forward-thinking and service-oriented organization welcomes feedback. Ignoring the feedback because it comes from a hacker whom you might have to seal in a room with no doors for the rest of her natural life just skews the sample.

Skye’s remarks on Grant Ward were three-fold: he was tall; he was firm; and his name was a 4th-level cleric spell in _Dungeons & Dragons_. The last claim was not true. But Fitzsimmons soon confirmed that it might easily have been.

Skye believes that Agent Ward’s name is boring. The kind of name one would use as a place-holder. Skye is young, and judgmental. She does not realize, yet, that there are times when it does not matter what holds a place. What matters is that a place, or a line, is held (in New York, in New Mexico, in L. A.).

Coulson remembers this, whenever he enjoys milk and cookies with Ward’s grandmother. Ward does not know of these meetings, and never will. 

***

Skye’s name (Coulson suspects) is her own creation. Truth be told, it makes him think of strippers. That’s a generation thing, which he resists.

Skye’s name means something else to her. Remarks she drops in passing leave this plain. To Skye, it speaks of possibility, and escape – the deep blue air, that is empty, and is endless.

Skye is a child of what now seem the Middle Ages – the time after Earth’s innocence, and before its wisdom. She grew to womanhood in the long years while her eponym was fearless. Before the desert rang at a hammer’s fall; before mankind was recalled to the knowledge that the heavens above are peopled, and unkind. 

***

Coulson does not really approve of portmanteaux. He much prefers a no-nonsense forward slash. Yes – he does know what that means. There are not many subjects Coulson does not know well enough to find embarrassing.

The same polymathy cannot be claimed, uniquely or severally, for Fitzsimmons. If Simmons read anything at her expensively dull boarding-school older than _Harry Potter_ , it is forgotten. Fitz is practically an antiquarian by comparison. He peers as far back into the abysm of history as Disney’s _Snow White_. 

Neither knows what “Fitz-” once meant as a prefix. Long ago, it was a patronymic. “FitzClarence” was like “ap Gruffydd” (or “Laufeyson”). Often, though not always, the siring it denoted was illegitimate. 

One given to glibness (or to mischief) might say, then, that “Fitz” plus “Simmons” equals “bastard”. Coulson watches the pair of them in their workshop. Thirty-six hours straight they have been working on the “Nega-Bands” (whatever off Earth those are); still, they frolic in each other’s intellect like dolphins. He knows that that glibness would be wrong.

***

When they first found her, she did not say what she was called. The first responders on the scene were sufficiently unnerved by what they discovered that they forgot protocol; they did not ask, and she did not volunteer the information. No one else they found there was in any position to comment. Well, almost no one, because by her exacting later standards she had been sloppy: one of the four bikers was still breathing. But he did not speak, and died from his injuries in the ambulance.

She had not bothered to run. That would have lacked economy of effort. Flight was never really an option, both from the attention she would have drawn in the redneck neighbourhood (she was Asian) and also from other factors (she was, as far as anyone could tell, thirteen). And so she sat, anonymous, and waited.

Her file first came across Coulson’s desk many years later, when her aptitudes had already been noted, and put to use. And the first thing he thought when he saw it was: _Aw crap, they gave her a_ name. 

Alliteration, he had already come to learn, was a warning-sign.

“Kids of today,” he says, as he corrects one of Ward’s reports with a fountain-pen. “They just don’t know their modal verbs. They think that ‘May’ means the same thing as ‘Might’…”

He looks up, and surveys the chamber, taking in the seven Centipede agents on the floor, whose day was going tolerably well until the ten seconds after the other occupant of the room had entered it. She looks back at him, and raises an eyebrow. Coulson sighs, returning to Ward’s report.

“…and they’re not wrong.”

***

This is the thing about Thor: he bruises words. But he bruises words like herbs, not flesh; he forces them to render up their fragrance. Agent Coulson, the Son of Coul, whose name is Phil, and sometimes (though reluctantly) “A. C.”, has learnt that lesson well. He breathes in the names of his team, and is content. 

FINIS

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from a poem by Henry Reed. The second part quotes "High Windows", by Philip Larkin.


End file.
